The Power of Plain Text

• All software, from the most basic website to the most complex application, is made up of text files.
• Text commands also provided the interface to most early computer programs. Today's computers are much more capable, and now most programs provide a GUI (graphical user interface) for convenience.
• But under the hood, many powerful text-based tools remain available.

Party like it's 1989

• MSWord
• Dreamweaver
• Flash
• The humble text editor

A Text Editor can very basic...

... or very powerful

Fortunately, many of the best ones are free!

Everyone should install

• Git version control tool:
• PC Users: Git for Windows (git-for-windows.github.io)
• Mac users: xcode-select --install
• Optional: GitHub Desktop (desktop.github.com)
• Atom Text Editor (atom.io/beta)
• Make an account on GitHub.com if you don't have one yet

Where to find it?

• Mac users: Terminal app
• PC users: Git Bash Shell

What can I do with it?

• This is another interface to your computer; you can think of it as a parallel to the desktop
• You can access the same files and do many of the same tasks
• Instead of clicking on icons, you enter text into the command line

Some simple commands

• Print your current working directory: pwd
• List all the files in a directory: ls
• List all files including hidden ones ls -a
• List files with a bunch of additional data: ls -lh
• Read a file with cat or less

What's going on here?

• ls, cat, less are commands, programs just like the icons in your Dock
• -a, -lh, etc. are arguments: options you provide to the program to tell it what to do.

What is Git?

Git Basics

Git is a command-line program for version control. You can think of it like MS Word's "track changes" feature, but applied to a folder full of files instead of just one document.

It is powerful but also very complex. We will stick with the basics for this course.

Repositories

A repository is a collection of files and folders that Git is keeping track of. You can turn any folder into a git repository by navigating to it in your terminal and typing git init.

Commits

The basic unit of Git is the commit. As you make changes to the files in your repository, you can use git commit to take a snapshot. Only the changes in files you explicitly add will be recorded in each commit.

A commit should contain a short description and an optional longer message that explains what was changed.

Over time the commits in a repository can become a detailed history of all the changes that have been made in a project. You can even "time travel" to revert a change or undo a mistake made at any point in the past.

Forking and Cloning

Git is also a distributed version control system. This means that each repository can be copied in many different locations.

Cloning lets you download an identical copy of a repository onto your machine so you can edit it locally.

Forking lets you make a copy that is entirely your own, which you can modify and redistribute however you see fit.

Clone a repository and study it

git clone https://github.com/getty-code-camp/ex-1-1.git
cd ex-1-1
git status
git log
git checkout initial-commit
git checkout first-update
git checkout master

Fork a repository

• Visit https://github.com/getty-code-camp/ex-1-1
• Click the "Fork" button in the upper right
• Clone a local copy: git clone https://github.com/YOUR_USER_NAME/ex-1-1.git
• Navigate to the project in your terminal

Make some changes

# Create a new file
touch textfile_3.txt

# Edit this file in your editor.
# When you are ready, you can commit the changes:
# You can do this via the terminal or in Atom.
git add textfile_3.txt
git commit -m "Added a new file."

Push those changes to GitHub

git push -u origin master

Congratulations! You're a programmer!